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Dysfunctional Since Before It Was Cool

Christopher Evan Welch and Kate Jennings Grant in a revival of The Marriage of Bette and Boo by Christopher Durang.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

TO facilitate an Internet search for his work, the playwright Christopher Durang lists the following keywords on his personal Web site: satire, parody and funny — as well as glaucoma drops, butter and zippers. To enter christopherdurang.com, you must click on a photo of a screaming Liv Ullmann.

Randomness and hysterics seem appropriate ways to access the grotesquely humorous world of Mr. Durang, the author of plays (“Laughing Wild,” “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You,” “Baby With the Bathwater”) that skewer religious orthodoxy, heterosexual nuptials and the afterlife. His darkly autobiographical play “The Marriage of Bette and Boo” — the one with stillborn children, alcoholism and cancer — originally opened 23 years ago at the Public Theater, with a cast that included Joan Allen, Olympia Dukakis, Mercedes Ruehl and Mr. Durang as the narrator. (In his review in The New York Times, Frank Rich said Mr. Durang demonstrated a “special knack for wrapping life’s horrors in the primary colors of absurdist comedy.”) The new Off Broadway revival, directed by Walter Bobbie and starring Victoria Clark and John Glover, with Kate Jennings Grant and Christopher Evan Welch in the title roles, now in previews, opens July 13 at the Roundabout Theater’s Laura Pels Theater.

Best known for his work from the 1980s, Mr. Durang, 59, these days teaches playwriting at Juilliard, blogs for The Huffington Post and has a new play, “Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them,” which is to have its premiere at the Public Theater next spring. He lives in Bucks County, Pa., with John Augustine, also a writer. “My relationship with my partner has lasted 23 years, and my parents’ bumpy marriage lasted 15 years,” Mr. Durang said. “So I win.”

Before a preview of “Bette and Boo,” Mr. Durang sat down with Erik Piepenburg to talk about being ahead of the “dysfunctional” curve, tangling with Catholicism and missing Wendy Wasserstein. Following are excerpts from their conversation.

It is my one unabashedly biographical play. It has a lot that’s true about my parents’ marriage, both the stillbirths they suffered through and the extended alcoholism throughout the family. I actually left out many other alcoholics in the family because it seemed like overwriting when I added it. ...

It was eerie sometimes to feel the biographical repercussions and just go, “Oof, that was painful.” How weird that I’m being this public presenting it, and not only that but, in the original one, being in it.

Photo

Christopher Durang at the Laura Pels Theater.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Now, of course, it’s very long ago. What I went through in my elementary school years and early high school is far behind me, which is a good thing. But I still will from time to time watch the play and say, “This is strange.”

The Play About the Family

So many American plays are about family. When you’re in the first part of your life, you write about family a lot. I find with my absurdist plays that I was actually writing about my family, but so disguised I didn’t realize it myself. For instance there are very forceful people in my family, and so in some of my crazy plays, like “The Nature and Purpose of the Universe,” there are people just bullying one another. But I wasn’t aware I was drawing on my family.

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“The Marriage of Bette and Boo,” I think, is more accessible to a general audience than some of my absurdist plays. ...When the play was done in 1985, the word dysfunctional wasn’t quite in the vernacular yet. It came out about two years later. I feel I was a little before the curve or something. Nobody has a perfect family, and I think everybody suffers through these things.

‘Sister Mary’

I sort of said no to a revival of “Sister Mary” during the height of Bush’s popularity because I just thought the religious right was so strong that I thought I actually don’t want to have this fight. I still think that play has value. The church, although they’ve changed a lot, their dogma is very similar. ...

The first year of it I wasn’t aware that there were people really upset about it. When it started to go out around the country, to St. Louis and Boston, there started to be pickets and protest. This group that’s still around, called the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, they see so-called anti-Catholicism everywhere.

In my view they mistake in my play criticism with bigotry. For God’s sake, it’s my own background I’m writing about. It’s stuff they taught me, the nuns taught me and the church still teaches. I think the church’s teaching on sexuality is still pathological. It’s actually unhealthy.

Wendy Wasserstein

My third year at Yale was Wendy’s first year. She was like the first new-person friend I made at Yale since making a number of friends my first year, and then no new ones the second year.

Wendy and I were very, very close. I think on some level we had a brother-sister kind of relationship. I was often in the position of telling her to speak up for herself and all that kind of stuff. I was also supportive of her work early when some other people weren’t. It was a lovely friendship.

A version of this interview appears in print on , on Page AR5 of the New York edition with the headline: Dysfunctional Since Before It Was Cool. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe